The far shores of environmentalism constitute what some have called a ‘luxury belief’. In other words it is a belief held by those who can afford to do so and who can to a certain extent insulate themselves from the negative effects of the belief as these effects will nearly always fall on the poor and the struggling.
In a way environmentalism is a bit like other similar luxury belief such as ‘open borders’ and ‘refugees welcome’, which are ideologies pushed by the middle class Left virtue-signallers who rarely have to live with the impact of their virtue-signalling. Just as the daughters of the middle class Left do not, like working class girls, have to live in fear of imported rapists and criminals, the middle class can afford the ‘green’ technology and services that are unaffordable to normal people.
I saw, for example, with my own eyes how London’s Low Emission Zone, something called for and championed by the Tarquins and Jemimas of the middle class Left did this. This policy didn’t make much impact those who could afford the latest low emission vehicles, but had the effect of driving dozens upon dozens of well established small freight companies, who could not afford the latest Euro 5 and Euro 6 class ‘green’ vehicles, out of business. The work that these companies once did was taken by those, often foreign, companies who could afford to splash the cash on a completely new fleet of vehicles.
The middle class Left’s pushing of these ‘luxury’ beliefs in ‘green’ stuff has also,in the town of Hay on Wye, had the effect of creating what I believe is one of the creepiest window displays I have ever seen. Whilst I was in Hay in December 2019 looking for some hard to get hold of books in one of the town’s many second hand bookshops, I chanced upon a fair trade shop that had devoted one third of its window display to the mentally handicapped climate fascist Greta Thunberg.
This shop had a massive cardboard face of Thunberg on display along with similar faces representing Sir David Attenborough and some other environmentalist. However it was the staring and creepy eyes of the Thunberg image that turned my stomach the most.
Creepy Greta display (image from Twitter)
This image stuck me as glaring example of the sort of secular idolatry that we saw too often and to such terrible effect, in the 20th century. In this case the idol was not of a dictator like Stalin or Hitler or of a deranged monarch like Germany’s Kaiser, but a disturbed and sick girl who is being used by wealthy and influential people as both a weapon and a shield for their own views and probably as a way of lining their own pockets. The use of the Greta image pulled me up sharp, like finding a Gary Glitter record in a stack of second hand vinyl at a record fair, where you know the backstory about the person and it turns the stomach.
Now as someone who believes, in principle, in the concept of fair trade, people should after all be paid the correct rate for what they do and not be unduly exploited, the Greta image on this shop did not encourage me to want to enter or buy anything. I’m not going to put any of my money anywhere near Greta or her acolytes. This is because I’ve followed the Greta story for a long while now and know that what she represents is not the reasonable idea of being good stewards of the planet, but instead she represents a form of eco-fascism. It is an eco-fascism where the rich get to drive, fly and heat their homes and eat well whilst everyone else gets to eat crap, shiver in cold houses and have their abilities to drive and go on holiday restricted in the name of ‘the environment’. The Greta face did not say to me ‘look after your world’ but instead it seemed to say to me ‘know your place you worthless pleb’.
I’m old enough to have seen some pretty awful window displays on retail shops over the years, displays that are inappropriately timed, amateurish or make the product itself that the shop is trying to sell look bad. Sometimes retailers make mistakes, I’ve even made retail mistakes myself such as trying to sell a job lot of second hand paraffin heaters at a street market in a baking hot July, but this Greta display must surely be for me the most creepy shop window display that I saw in 2019. You don’t bring people into a shop by confronting them with an image like the one above, in fact, as in my case, it’s a damn good way of driving the more thoughtful potential customer away.
